by Nigel Jones
In the morning there was a route march across the desert sands, and by midday he was exhibiting the symptoms of sunstroke: a high temperature, nausea, diarrhoea and a headache. Charles Lister took him by taxi to the best hotel in town, the Casino Palace, but he was not excused duties, and spent the next morning practising shooting with his platoon. Shaw-Stewart had come down with similar symptoms, and their illness was vaguely put down to ‘a touch of the sun’ or the dysentery that often afflicts unacclimatized Britons in the Tropics. That night he vomited, and the next morning, feeling ghastly, he slept outside his tent in search of a breath of fresh air in the stifling desert heat.
On 2 April the whole Division was due to be reviewed by the newly arrived Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton. Brooke lay under a green awning outside his tent, his head throbbing and his ears singing. Denis Browne took a picture of him – the last of his life – asleep on his cot, with peaked cap and sunglasses, his mouth open. After completing his review, Hamilton, who had been enjoined by Churchill and the Asquiths in London to do what he could to preserve Brooke, called on the sick man. He noted the meeting in his diary: ‘He looked extraordinarily handsome … quite a knightly presence stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his feet.’ Sitting at Brooke’s bedside the General offered him a ‘cushy billet’: a job on his personal staff on the Queen Elizabeth. Brooke refused. ‘He very naturally would like to see this adventure through with his own men,’ Hamilton reported back to Eddie Marsh, another admirer with his own reasons for wanting to keep his beloved boy safe from harm: ‘It was very natural and I quite understand it – I should have answered the same in his case had I been offered a staff billet.’ According to Hamilton, Brooke told him that though he realized the privileges he would be passing up by his refusal, he felt bound to undergo the ordeal of the landing ‘shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrades’. If he survived, well, he might take the General up on his offer. This, the poet-General approvingly remarked, would enable him to ‘keep an eye on the most distinguished of the Georgians’. On this note they parted.
Brooke gave his own account of this momentous meeting – his last chance to save his own life, as he must have thought, even though the fatal illness that was to destroy him was probably already under way – in a letter to Violet Asquith when he was feeling somewhat restored on 9 April:
… just now – for these six days – I’ve been a victim to the sun. He struck me down, all unaware, the day before Sir Ian inspected us. I lay, racked by headaches & diarrhoea, under an awning on the sand while the stokers trudged past. Afterwards, Sir Ian came to see me a moment. A notable meeting, it was generally felt: our greatest poet-soldier & our greatest soldier-poet. We talked blank verse. He looked very worn & white-haired. I thought him a little fearful – less than cock-sure – about the job.
Before leaving the Division to return to his headquarters, the Commander-in-Chief drew Colonel Quilter to one side. ‘Mind you take care of him,’ he said. ‘His loss would be a national loss.’ Fortified by the visit, Brooke willed himself to get up that same afternoon and return to the Casino Palace, where Shaw-Stewart was still sweating out his fever. Brooke, whose own temperature was an alarming 103 degrees, joined him. Next morning he waved aside a doctor, who wanted him admitted to hospital, and consulted instead the Regimental Medical Officer, who prescribed a strict diet of arrowroot to counter the diarrhoea. He and Shaw-Stewart spent the next six days in the jelly-brained vacuity of convalescence, lying under their mosquito-nets, letting their beards grow and only stirring to stagger down the corridor for frequent visits to the toilet. He mustered the energy to write a couple of comic verses on their plight with the refrain: ‘This is the seventh time today.’
As their condition slowly mended, they improved their diet to include by degrees chicken broth, fruit and finally fish. But, if Brooke’s martial spirit was still willing, the flesh was most definitely weak: ‘I shall be able to give my Turk,’ he told Violet, ‘at the utmost a kitten’s tap. A diet of arrowroot does not build up violence. I am as weak as a pacifist. The better able to survey & note maybe …’ Ominously, since his arrival in the hotel, he had been bothered by a swelling sore on the left side of his upper lip. He shrugged it off, and it seemed to improve with the departure of his fever; but it was to prove to be the first onset of the condition that would kill him – probably the bite of one of the fearsome Egyptian mosquitoes, which, a few years later, would also claim the life of Lord Carnarvon, co-discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun, in almost identical circumstances.
Brooke posted the gifts he had brought in the Cairo bazaar the day he had been struck down: a tear bottle for his mother and an amber necklace for Cathleen, along with reassuring little notes. Colonel Quilter visited the sickbay, and, alarmed by Brooke’s thin appearance and shaky state, recommended that he stay behind for a fortnight’s convalescence after the Battalion sailed in two days’ time. Quilter was mindful of Hamilton’s injunction, but again Brooke refused the chance to preserve his life. The day before their departure he shaved and sent Eileen Wellesley a pair of semiprecious stones.
The next day, 10 April, at 6 a.m., Brooke and Shaw-Stewart were back on board the Grantully Castle as she slowly steamed back to the Aegean. Brooke, still feeling distinctly seedy, remained in bed for three days. He had the leisure to write in his journal a beautiful passage of reflections on the environment:
There are moments – there have been several, especially in the Aegean – when, through some beauty of sky and air and earth, and some harmony with the mind, peace is complete and completely satisfying. One is at rest from the world, and with it, entirely content, drinking to the full of the placidity of the loveliness. Every second seems divine and sufficient. And there are men and women who seem to do what one so terribly can’t, and so terribly, at these moments, aches to do – store up reservoirs of this calm and content, fill and seal great jars or pitchers during these half-hours, and draw on them at later moments, when the source isn’t there, but the need is very great.
He also found time to write more letters. To Jacques, in a spirit of farewell, he wrote: ‘I turn to you. Keep innumerable flags flying. I’ve only two reasons for being sorry for dying – (several against) – I want to destroy some evils, and to cherish some goods. Do it for me. You understand. I doubt if anyone else does – almost …’ Eddie dutifully sent him a clipping from The Times which reported that, on 5 April, Dean Inge of St Paul’s, a sombre cleric known as ‘the gloomy Dean’, had read ‘The Soldier’ ‘from the pulpit of the great cathedral’, commenting that the young Brooke would, he ventured to think, ‘take rank with our great poets’. The Dean qualified his praise by deploring the lack of conventional Christian sentiment in the sonnet. Being ‘a pulse in the eternal mind’, he thought, did not exactly qualify as the ever-present certainty of the Resurrection being celebrated that Easter Sunday. As the Dean closed his remarks by praising Brooke’s ‘pure and elevated patriotism’ a pacifist in the congregation rose to his feet and denounced the war. It was already clear that Brooke, in the eyes of the general public, was either damned or praised solely on the simplified view of what he thought of the war.
Eddie also brought news of a review in the Times Literary Supplement heaping praise on the latest issue of New Numbers, which contained the war sonnets. The TLS critic said that ‘the very blood and youth of England seem to find expression’ in the poems, which ‘speak not for one heart only, but for all to whom her call has come in the hour for need and found instantly ready … no passion for glory here, no bitterness, no gloom, only a happy, clear-sighted all surrendering love’. Thus, before he was dead, the rudiments of the legend that would gather around Brooke were already taking their place.
Inspired by the news of New Numbers, Brooke took up a letter to its co-editor, Lascelles Abercrombie, describing his recent sickness, which he still put down to ‘sunstroke [which] is a bloody affair. It breaks very suddenly the fair harmonies of the body and soul. My
head was shattered in three parts, and my diarrhoea was part of the cosmic process.’ He hadn’t, he said, the time or detachment to write, though he had been jotting down a few aimless lines, detached ‘from the ambient air … collaring one or two of the golden phrases that a certain wind blows from (will the Censor let me say?) Olympus, across these purple seas. In time, if I’m spared, they’ll bloom into a sort of threnody – really a discussion of England – which I have in my head …’
Brooke and his fellow-officers who ate at the same table in the mess – Lister, Asquith, Shaw-Stewart, Kelly, Browne and Dodge – had devised an ingenious way of getting round the censor and letting their friends in England who shared the benefits of a Classical education know where they were. They were derisively nicknamed the Latin Club by their less well-educated comrades, but actually their discourse was of Ancient Greece, and, using Shaw-Stewart’s edition of Herodotus as a crib, they had devised a code using Homeric illustrations. By now they had been diverted from Lemnos, whose harbour was chock-a-block with Allied shipping, and were heading for the nearby island of Skyros, Achilles’ refuge from the Trojan wars and the island where his protector, King Lykomedes, had treacherously slain Theseus, King of Athens. Drawing their pitchers of sustenance from these ancient tales, their minds ticked over in neutral. In his last letter to his mother Brooke described the future as ‘an absolute blank’ but added: ‘if anyone in this war is lucky, we who are on this job are’.
It was during these last days of peace on the wine-dark sea that Brooke wrote his fragmentary final poem on a new note of resignation and quiet thought – far from the stridency of the sonnets. It is as good a note as any on which to pass into eternity:
I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night
Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped
In at the windows, watched my friends at table,
Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,
Or coming out into the darkness. Still
No one could see me.
I would have thought of them
—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,
Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness
And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that
This gay machine of splendour ’ld soon be broken,
Thought little of, pashed, scattered …
Only, always,
I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass
Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,
Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,
That broke to phosphorus out in the night,
Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die
To other ghosts—this one, or that, or I.
They reached Trebuki Bay, the largest natural anchorage in the Aegean, on the south coast of the hourglass-shaped island of Skyros on 17 April. Pacing the deck together that evening, Brooke and Lister noted the strong smell of flowering sage and thyme that drifted across the wind from the dark island. Brooke remained on ship the next day, while the others explored the island. He wrote to his friend Sybil Pye, who, one voice in a gathering chorus, had expressed her admiration for his sonnets. Eddie was told:
I cannot write you any description of my life. It is entirely featureless. It would need Miss Austen to make anything of it. We glide to and fro on an azure sea and forget the war – I must go and censor my platoon’s letters. My long poem is to be about the existence – and non-locality – of England. And it contains the line:
In Avons of the heart her rivers run.
Lovely isnt it [sic].
The following day, 19 April, Brooke went ashore to lead his platoon in a Battalion exercise. The stokers could not resist the temptation of expending some of their ammunition in shooting snakes, or attempting to organize a tortoise race. They marvelled at the island’s wild beauty: tumbled pink and white marble rocks, interspersed with patches of wild flowers: scarlet poppies, ilex and everywhere the ubiquitous scented herbs thyme, sage and mint. The exercise was by way of a warm-up for a full Divisional Field Day, a war game planned for Tuesday 20 April, held in a dried-up river valley under the shadow of Mount Khokilas, the highest point on Skyros. Operations paused for lunch, and Denis Browne led his companions to an olive grove he had discovered a mile inland where they rested under the shade. Brooke, already tired, remarked on the peace and beauty of the place. Browne, Lister and Shaw-Stewart were to remember this comment when it came to selecting the site for Brooke’s last resting-place.
As they assembled at the beach, Freyberg, a strong swimmer, suggested swimming back to the ship, but Brooke said he wasn’t up to it, and took a fisherman’s boat back laden with their clothes. The final phase of his illness was beginning, and his race was almost run. The Battalion’s officers treated two of their comrades from a neighbouring ship, the Franconia, to dinner that evening; but Brooke was notably quiet amid the noisy festivities, and told Shaw-Stewart at the end of the meal that the hock they were drinking was making his lip swell again. At ten o’clock, pleading tiredness, he went to bed.
Oc Asquith looked in on his cabin the next morning and found that Brooke’s lip had swelled still further. He complained, too, of pains in his back and head, but lay in bed all day before sending for the Divisional surgeon, Dr McCracken, that evening. The doctor found that Brooke had a temperature of 101, and ordered hot compresses for his swollen lip. Denis Browne looked in on Brooke later, armed with The Times’s report of Dean Inge’s sermon on ‘The Soldier’. Brooke said he felt very bad and asked Denis to leave the light off. He tried to rise to his usual flippancy by saying he had already read the piece and was sorry the Dean had unfavourably compared his sentiments to those of the Prophet Isaiah. But Denis saw that he was too sick for jokes and left him alone to sleep. By the next morning, 22 April, the Battalion’s doctors realized that Brooke was seriously – perhaps fatally – ill. His continuing pains in the back and now the chest gave warning that a bacterial infection was running rampant through his always frail, but now dangerously depleted, body. An anxious Denis called in on Brooke three times in the course of the day, but on each occasion found him semi-conscious.
At 3 p.m. McCracken called a conference with his fellow-physicians, Drs Gaskell, Casement, and Schlesinger, whom Denis had known at Guy’s Hospital. They were joined by Dr Goodale, the Grantully Castle’s surgeon and a bacteriologist, who confirmed the fear that Brooke was suffering from acute blood poisoning, and, moreover, had virtually no chance of survival. The onset of the illness had been brutally swift, and Brooke’s jest about Dean Inge were the last conscious thoughts he formulated as words before lapsing into a comatose state. The source of the toxins that were destroying him, the doctors agreed, was the sore on his lip, which was probably an infected mosquito bite. In the days before antibiotics, once septicaemia had declared itself there was next to no chance. Brooke’s friends were advised to prepare themselves for the end.
They resolved to go down fighting. As the doctors decided to conduct an exploratory operation on Brooke’s neck, to take a swab for analysis from the abscess that had formed on the side of his face and was quickly spreading down his neck to his torso, someone remembered that an ancient French hospital ship, the Duguay-Trouin, built in Brest in 1878, was anchored in the bay nearby. Facilities would be better there than on the cramped and stuffy Grantully Castle. The decision to transfer Brooke was rapidly made and executed, and he was stretchered into a pinnace. As he was lowered into the boat, he recovered consciousness momentarily, pushed the blankets off his face and recognized Denis, who was gently lifting him down. ‘Hello,’ he said, trying to force a smile. It was his last word.
The staff on the Duguay-Trouin, who were preparing for battle casualties, and had only one other patient to deal with, put Brooke into an airy cabin set on the aft sun-deck of the ship. Having seen him installed, Oc Asquith and Denis left the hospital ship around six and went to the Franconia to send the first news of Brooke’s illness to t
he outside world. One cable went to Hamilton at Lemnos, the other to the Admiralty in London. Signed by General Paris, the RND Commander, the marconigram to Hamilton described Brooke’s disease as ‘Diplococcus, morphologically resembling Pneumococcus’, adding: ‘Condition very grave. Please inform parents and send me instructions re disposal of body in case he dies and duplicate them to Duguay-Trouin.’
At the Admiralty, Eddie received the news he had long dreaded. He instantly wired the Ranee in Rugby: ‘I have had bad news admiral telegraphs Rupert on board french hospital ship duguay trouin with septicaemia condition very grave please inform mother and telegraph instructions if anything special end of telegram. Churchill is telegraphing for further report is there anything you wish wired I have strong hope Marsh.’
Churchill himself wired his cousin, who was serving in the Aegean: ‘Personal. From First Lord to Major John Churchill. Endeavour if your duties allow to attend Rupert Brooke’s funeral on my behalf. We shall not see his like again. W.S.C.’
As these messages hummed across the wires, the dying man at the still centre of the storm moved peacefully towards the shade. Oc and Denis crossed back to the Duguay-Trouin soon after 9 a.m. on Friday 23 April, St George’s Day and the birth- and death-day of William Shakespeare. Now another poet was about to join the bard on Parnassus. They agreed to mount a vigil at the bedside, Oc taking the first watch. ‘He was unconscious,’ he told his sister later; ‘at least, twice, when I spoke to him, he seemed to make an effort in his throat to speak: but no words came.’